November 04, 2008	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 5, 1429

JACKSONVILLE (Florida), Nov 3: Front-runner Barack Obama and his comeback-seeking White House rival John McCain dashed through critical states in a frenetic final blitz on Monday, on the eve of US elections.

Democrat Obama was on the threshold of history with a favourite’s chance to become the first black US president, after a stunning rise from near national obscurity to the pinnacle of American politics in just four years.

Republican McCain was vowing to prove pollsters wrong by staging one of the most shocking upsets in US political history, but had almost no room for error in a handful of toss-up states where the battle is most fierce.

Obama, 47, pumped up a swaying, chanting, screaming crowd in the Jacksonville Veterans’ Memorial Arena, the place where McCain delivered one of the campaign’s defining remarks by declaring the teetering US economy fundamentally “strong.” “I have just one word for you, Florida: tomorrow,” Obama exclaimed, sparking deafening roars and chants of “Yes we can” from the crowd of more than 9,000.

“We are one day away from changing the United States of America,” the Illinois senator said, hammering the economy anew as polls gave him a commanding lead across the political map.

McCain meanwhile swooped into an airport hangar in Blountville, Tennessee to rally loyal supporters in the solidly Republican state and neighboring Virginia.

“I am so touched by this turnout. I’m so grateful for this expression of support,” McCain told more than 1,000 people crammed into the cavernous hangar.

Earlier McCain had launched an election-eve sprint across seven states in the shadow of a 65,000-seat stadium in Tampa, Florida — the sort of venue Obama has been packing regularly during his campaign — before around 500 supporters.

The 72-year-old former prisoner of war in Vietnam defiantly predicted victory despite polls showing him lagging behind Obama.

“There’s one day left until we take America in a new direction,” McCain told the crowd in Tampa. “The pundits may not know it and the Democrats may not know it but the ‘Mac is back’ and we’re going to win this election.” The two rivals offer different routes out of the worst US economic crisis since the 1930s, and both promise to transform US foreign policy, though with sharply different approaches.

McCain was on a dash through Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Indiana, New Mexico and Nevada before heading home to Arizona for election day.

Obama was to blitz through Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, bidding to storm Republican bastions and turn them over to his side.

“It would take an improbable last-minute shift in voter preferences, or a huge Republican advantage in election day turnout, for McCain to improve enough upon his predicted share of the vote ... to overcome his deficit to Obama,” the pollster said.

Obama also leads by slimmer margins in the battleground states where the election will be won and lost, including in states such as Virginia and North Carolina that have not backed a Democratic hopeful in decades.

The battle has narrowed to states that have been reliably Republican in recent elections, as Obama’s deep-pocketed campaign expands to places where Democrats have not won in years.

To win, a candidate needs to gain 270 votes in the Electoral College that formally selects the next president. States are apportioned electoral votes according to the size of their population and in most cases the winner of a state’s popular vote gets all its electoral ones.—AFP